Elric of Melniboné
The doomed albino emperor who draws power from a soul-eating sword is the anti-Conan and the godfather of dark fantasy. Moorcock's Eternal Champion concept and his multiverse gave fantasy its first genuinely philosophical underpinning.
“Moorcock tells the reader EVERYTHING, there’s not the slightest bit of subtlety,” one reader protests: the cosmology gets explained directly instead of emerging. The secondary cast is thin, “the characters were worse than two dimensional,” the princess existing to be endangered while the cousin twirls a metaphorical moustache. Elric’s motivations do not track scene to scene; to one detractor he is “one stupid, selfish, whiny, unlikeable bastard,” to another the whole reads like “some teenager’s fanfiction.” Readers promised a crippled protagonist watch that handicap vanish almost immediately once the sword arrives. And the pacing is frantic rather than brisk, threats introduced and dropped within a page.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
